I made the attached simple spreadsheet as a tool for people who (like me ten+ years ago when I did a Feldenkrais training) need some tools to think practically about whether Feldenkrais can support them as a business.
The pre-filled numbers may represent what it takes 2 or so years to get to: 3 weekly classes with 5 students for ATM, and 5 average FIs per week.
Your reference point for filling it in should be what you see around you in the local market. What do yoga teachers charge for classes? What do MTs charge, and what can you charge, given the likely lack of insurance coverage? How many FIs do your fellow FPs give on average, honestly?
If you don’t want to think of “making back” your investment in training, take that number out. If you don’t want to attend advanced trainings, or they happen locally so you don’t have to travel, take that number out or lower it.
When you do the numbers, you see why it’s primarily a home/basement studio business, or second income on top of a secure spouse or early retirement payout (or a trust fund). You can also make the choice to live a somewhat monastic life in the service of pursuing your interests and helping people. That might sound romantic, but living monastically is also living one accident away from homelessness.
This spreadsheet is limited–you may have a space and rent it out to others when you’re not teaching, and this could be a major income source (or even the major source). You may start developing and marketing books and recordings.
We don’t need to kick ourselves over the challenges here–a Yoga studio is also a hard business to run successfully, and it has going for it that it’s what everyone’s doing. Think of this spreadsheet as your business’s ATM–try out variations. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be as realistic about money as we are about the role of the mass of the pelvis in organizing action. When you know what you’re doing…
Dear Lynette,
Thank you for providing voice recordings of your past lessons free. It is something which at least personally, I can say that I have benefited from. One suggestion might be to have a “Donate” button on your page – I’d be happy to contribute to help. I’m guessing that like me, there would be many others who would have benefited from the free lessons that you provide and would also be happy to contribute money. I also occasionally refer to the wikispaces page in which I notice you spend a fair bit of time providing details of the many lessons taught by Moshe Feldenkrais – without your efforts, it would be much harder to get the same information. Once again, thank you for effort and sharing what you have learned with us.
Regards,
Vikram
Hi dear Lynett, I can`t find the contact-button, so I try this way.
First of all, I`really enjoy listening to your voice as much as to what you say.
IT`s like a short holiday to do one of your classes.
My question: Yetserday in the evening I wasn`t able to open this site.
This morning, luckily I found out that it was available again.
I wonder if it`s me or how / why I can`t find the structered ATM`s in lists. You had great comments on the site which I can`t find anymore.
Also I`m not able to download an ATM for a journey in a train when I can`t go online.
It was very nice to look for ATM`s you can do in sitting, lying on …
as well as looking for `ATM-groups`
It would be a big big pity if you had taken it away … Or is it just me who can not find it.
???
I`d be very please to hear from you.
Best wishes from Germany,
Ute
Hi Ute,
The very sad story is that my website got infected or corrupted or something and I couldn’t retrieve it in the same system I was using. I did manage to export most things to another system, and I’ll be slowly returning as much of the function as I can! It’s great to hear specifically what you are looking for because I don’t necessarily know what functions people were using on the old site.
I’ll look at the tag clouds; the structured lists will take a little fiddling to return (the site’s internal links from one page to another are destroyed).
Does the “download” on the lessons not work? For me also it opens it for streaming instead of downloading. I’ll look at that too.
-Lynette
If you right click on the “download” link you can save it. There’s a complicated reason why the default for “download” is to stream and not download!